Q: Back in the day, they cleared an accident and got traffic
moving again. Now, they block the road for hours for who knows what
reason. I'm thinking of Monday's crash on the Glenn Jackson Bridge,
which did not involve a fatality but messed up traffic for hours and
hours on both I-205 and I-5. Why?

Let's go to the replay: A wrong-way semi truck driver, who was
arrested on a charge of drunk driving, crashed head-on into a
southbound Honda Civic at 4:20 a.m. For the next 5 1/2 hours, only one
lane of Vancouver-to-Portland traffic trickled across the bridge, while
thousands of 205 commuters took their chances on I-5.

Fortunately, no one was killed.

Police and highway crews say they can't recall "the day" when a
similar scene wouldn't have taken hours and hours to clear. After
digging through 25 years of reports on similar Oregon highway crashes,
I couldn't find any evidence to contradict them.

Meanwhile, my quick analysis of ODOT crash alerts in the past
month showed the average time to clear a crash not involving a death in the Portland metro
area was about 32 minutes.

In fact, last year, ODOT started a program allowing dispatchers monitoring dozens of highway cameras deep in the bowels of downtown Portland's highway nerve center to call a tow truck for lane-blocking stalls and minor accidents.

That simple task was once reserved for police and highway crews, who would sometimes take several minutes to get to the scene in heavy traffic.

A non-fatal crash's potential to disrupt traffic depends on a
number of factors, including time, place, injuries, traffic volume, the
size of the debris field and vehicle types. All of those were working
against a speedy opening of the Glenn Jackson's lanes.

The biggest problem was the wrecked semi-tractor trailer, which was facing the wrong direction and leaking all kinds of fluid.

A 70-ton jackknifed semi in the mix typically adds about four
hours to the process of reopening lanes, largely because of the
specialized equipment and finesse needed to tow it away, said Ted
Miller, an ODOT maintenance and operations manager.

It's a big production. And in the Portland region, there are only
two tow trucks big enough to handle such a job. Road crews have to pray
one of them is available.

Q: Cruising Interstate 5 through Siskiyou Pass, I've noticed a
number of "runaway truck ramps." How frequently are they used in
Oregon? They fascinate me. None of them appear to be used. Even one use
a year would seem to be newsworthy.

A: Oh, you're not the only one intrigued by those ramps extending from the West's most vertiginous freight routes.

In fact, as a hyper-imaginative kid growing up in the Washington Cascades, I figured they were top-secret launching pads for souped-up
Evel Knievel rockets with alien-vaporizing lasers. (Pew! Pew! Pew!)

Ahem. Anyway. Back to reality – and traffic physics 101.

Say you're behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler hauling cargo down
a massively steep mountainside and your speed gets away from you.

Take one of these off-ramps, also known as "escape ramps," leading up a gravel-covered rise and
let gravity do its job. (You might also want to change your Underoos
once that big rig has halted to a stop.)

They're used more than you think in Oregon.

For instance, the two ramps on the I-5 slope heading into Oregon
from California just past the Siskiyou Pass summit – one near the top,
one near the bottom – stopped 33 runaway trucks in 2012, according to
the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Ramp designs vary from state to state, but ODOT uses a thick layer
of pea gravel on top of a layer of crushed rock to create the extra
friction needed to stop a runaway truck. "Usually," said ODOT spokesman
Don Hamilton, "it takes just one truck length to stop."

After each incident, maintenance crews are called to reset the
rock and gravel, which is probably why none of them look used. ODOT also
cleans and weeds each ramp every couple years.

The agency would rather do that than mop up after a semi-on-semi
crash like the one a few years ago at the bottom of I-84's Cabbage Hill
in the Blue Mountains.

A runaway tractor-trailer's driver didn't use one of the available
ramps. As a result, it tipped into another rig stacked with brand new
Porsches.

As if hit by Evel Knievel lasers, the expensive German sports cars went up in flames.